Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots

Abstract--Animals have evolved various agile locomotion strategies, such as sprinting, leaping, and jumping. There is a growing interest in developing legged robots that move like their biological counterparts and show various agile skills to navigate complex environments quickly. Despite the interest, the field lacks systematic benchmarks to measure the performance of control policies and hardware in agility. We introduce the Barkour benchmark, an obstacle course to quantify agility for legged robots. Inspired by dog agility competitions, it consists of diverse obstacles and a time based scoring mechanism. This encourages researchers to develop controllers that not only move fast, but do so in a controllable and versatile way. To set strong baselines, we present two methods for tackling the benchmark. In the first approach, we train specialist locomotion skills using on-policy reinforcement learning methods and combine them with a highlevel navigation controller. In the second approach, we distill the specialist skills into a Transformer-based generalist locomotion policy, named Locomotion-Transformer, that can handle various terrains and adjust the robot's gait based on the perceived There has been a proliferation of legged robot development inspired by animal mobility. An important research question in this field is how to develop a controller that enables legged robots to exhibit animal-level agility while also being able to generalize environments, such as up and down stairs, through bushes, across various obstacles and terrains. Through the exploration and over unpaved roads and rocky or even sandy beaches. of both learning and traditional control-based methods, there Despite advances in robot hardware and control, a major has been significant progress in enabling robots to walk across challenge in the field is the lack of standardized and intuitive a wide range of terrains [10, 21, 20, 1, 27]. These robots are methods for evaluating the effectiveness of locomotion now capable of walking in a variety of indoor and outdoor controllers.